Tag Archives: travel

Hello. I haven’t written here in a while. That’s something I hope to change.

I realise it is 6 weeks into the year already, but after a trip to California last week, my own vague ideas about what 2016 should mean for me, have solidified.

Travel (a bit) less / be more thoughtful about travel. I’m in an International role, and I work for a company with headquarters and many of the decision-makers 8 hours behind me. This makes the notion of travelling less in 2016 a little ironic and possibly, untenable! Nevertheless, I work with a great team and I hope to be more thoughtful about where and when I travel (and for how long) this year. I know I’ll do more again, but right now, I’m at a point in my life where I need to be setting more roots and plans locally. Interestingly, my trip to SF this week was my first significant travel since October, so this is already working (to an extent), but the global #HelloWorld tour will of course eat into that significantly – not that I’m complaining!

Make more Stuff. Per Chris Heilmann’s fantastic post about Developer Relations / Evangelism / Advocacy this past week, “how often do you code?” is a key question in understanding our role(s), and I’d been aware for a while that I simply hadn’t been doing much of it lately (beyond testing out examples where devs said they were unable to make samples work). My plan in 2016 is to build something – anything – at least once a month. So far this year I’ve dabbled in Twitter ebooks bots and Alexa skills – both built on the backs of others – but I hope to build, publish, and write about more in the coming months. I’m particularly excited by the growing trend towards No UI / conversational interfaces and it has been great to re-connect with friends like Matt and Haje in the preceding months on these topics. I’m also hoping to write a lot more, as blogging and sharing is a major part of where the amazing ride and network I’ve enjoyed since ~2006, started.

Invest more time in mentoring others. In my previous lives at IBM and Pivotal I had a lot of opportunity to get involved in these activities. I’ve been at Twitter very close to 2 years now, and it is incredible to realise how much I’ve learned “through osmosis” – partly from amazing individuals like Isaac, Sylvain, Taylor, Craig, Chris, and Romain – and more often, from others still around me. My goal in 2016 is to share my knowledge and support much more widely: both to co-workers, third party developers, and up-and-coming members of the tech community around me. Time to hit the local meetup circuit, and to do more coaching of others in public speaking, career mentoring, and personal support.

I’ve got a lot of exciting stuff to look forward to this year professionally – I’m deeply involved in a number of initiatives, and I’m excited that @jack has put Developers firmly on our list of priorities! This is where I’d always hoped we would get back to. Nevertheless, on top of that, these are three of my personal plans for the next ~10 1/2 months. I’ve made a good start.

As always, I’m open to comments here, but you’ll also find me open to discuss on Twitter @andypiper.

Fresh from a quick presentation and supporting Hackference this past weekend (more on that soon), I’ve turned my attention to the next couple of months of travel and events. There’s a lot of stuff happening!

Instead of being in the UK, this coming weekend I’m headed to Santa Clara for Platform: the Cloud Foundry Conference – our first developer summit for the whole Cloud Foundry community. On the back of partnership announcements with companies like IBM, Savvis and Piston, this is looking extremely exciting. I don’t have a formal speaking slot, but I’m going to be heavily involved and have helped with the planning and scheduling. I’m hoping to get a couple of topics onto the agenda for the unconference slot on the Monday afternoon, too!

Immediately after Platform is the annual SpringOne 2GX event. There has been a huge amount of activity in the Spring community over the past couple of months and I think it is safe to say that this year there is some major excitement around where Spring has been headed. I’ve been privileged to spend some time with folks like Adrian Colyer recently, and I know the entire team has been working hard on many projects, so expect some very interesting news about the evolution of Spring and its capabilities. I’m speaking on the Cloud Foundry track, on the first morning of the conference, with my good friend (and Spring Developer Advocate) Josh Long, covering the topic “Build your Spring Applications on Cloud Foundry”.

Later on the same day I’ll be zipping up to San Francisco to participate in a panel discussion at CloudBeat 2013, alongside my friend Diane Mueller and others. The panel topic is “Is PaaS Still Coming?” and we’re on at 1.50 in the afternoon slot. If you are interested in coming along, full event details can be found here, and you can save 20% on a ticket (there is a bunch of great content throughout the event, so if you are in the Bay Area it looks worthwhile). Hashtag for this one is #cloudbeat2013.

[pause for breath… and relax]

The following week I’m enormously honoured to have been invited to a panel at GigaOM Structure Europe, at home here in London. The topic of this one is “DevOps: Is Synchronicity Here?” and rounds out day 2 of the event by taking a look at the current state of DevOps. This link should save you 25% on a ticket and I’d be delighted to see you there.

I’m spending a couple of weeks on business in China. It’s an exciting trip as it is my first time in mainland China, I’m getting to do a lot of travelling around, and I’m building some connections with my colleagues in IBM’s China Development Labs (and I was able to spend time with Chinese colleagues in the UK in preparation, learning about the business culture and language here).

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind already. Shortly after landing on Friday I gave a relatively impromptu 2 hour presentation to the WebSphere developers in CDL, which covered everything from life in Hursley, through my career, our product strategies, and the latest news on technologies like WebSphere MQ, MQTT, Message Broker and WebSphere Registry and Repository.

My first “free” day in Beijing, Saturday, was very wet… and I underestimated the distances on the map in an attempt to walk to an attraction which I deemed “fairly close” to my hotel. Word of advice: the guidebooks describe Beijing as “not very walkable”, and my impression is that it really isn’t; I should have taken a cab! Today though, the weather changed and I was able to get out to see a couple of the sights including the Forbidden City (which I’ve previously mentioned here on my blog, in the context of the Beyond Space and Time project which utilises IBM technology and our experience in virtual worlds), and part of the Great Wall. Really spectacular stuff. Colleagues helped me to arrange a tour with Grayline and I have to say that they were excellent. The one obvious issue here is traffic, which is really choking movement – other than that it’s a very pleasant, modern (but utterly vast!) city with some wonderful people.

I didn’t bring an SLR with me but I captured a few shots with the iXUS and iPhone 4. Keep an eye on Flickr.

Tomorrow it’s straight into workshops, roundtables and presentations, and I’ll be travelling around for much of the next couple of weeks, so online interactions may be limited.